willbudd

> It's not about "no downside"! That completely misunderstands. It's about a HUGE upside.

Let's compromise and say it's both? You're right that the upper bound experienced may be a lot higher than most may realize, but it's also true that the lower bound may no longer seem that deep of an abyss as it appears to most. Hence the mental equilibrium in-between being at a point that can seem somewhat alien to those who live more slow-burning lives.

Regardless of what cultural category may or may not apply, I find that line of thought rather unconstructive. This isn't about being anyone's opinion on suicide like some black and white binary stance whether you're "for" or "against". This is about coming to terms with your own mortality.

It's about the grey area in-between the extremes of committing suicide (the "black"), and forever running away from risk so that you can die of cancer while undergoing chemotherapy and getting your diapers changed in an elderly home (the "white"(?)).

And if even discussing the topic in those terms touches on some kind of taboo, then yes; perhaps you're right to emphasize the cultural component involved.

I feel like you and all the people replying to you are completely missing the obvious. To someone who has been depressed for many years, for someone who literally (according the article) contemplated jumping of the roof of a 10 story building, "probably dying at some point" is not a deal-breaker or even all that much of a downside per se.

We're all going to die at some point, and while most/many of us might want to delay that inevitability as much as possible, I don't think it's warranted at all to assume that the same premise applies to every single one of us. This guy realized that the only thing in life he could truly enjoy was climbing rocks. Do we really need to fault him for deciding to then just do that thing until fate eventually catches up as it always does?

Sure, it may be rough on the people whose lives they intersect with, but provided they're not a parent raising a child/children/etc, acceptance of one another for who we are is all that remains. Personally, I'd take short-lived good company over long-lived mediocre company any day.

Will-free? Unless that's a play on my first name, I'm not sure I agree. I see no reason why AI would have any difficulty defining its own reward functions. Especially if it also has an abstract overarching reward function that's wide enough in scope. For example, "learn as much about the universe as you can" would allow a very long curiosity-driven bucket list of pursuits it could "long" for.

Yeah, that was sloppy phrasing on my part: I meant that in a top of the food chain / king of the jungle sort of way rather than any extinction events per se.

You jest, but that has a good likelihood of becoming the watershed moment. The moment AI is bootstrapped to the point where it surpasses human ability to advance the AI SOTA, it's pretty much game over—from a Darwinian point of view at least.

And I have a hard time seeing any reason why that would be a matter of "if" rather than "when".

The real problem is a society that allows loans to exist where the loanee has no meaningful collateral. If an institution cannot fill its classrooms without stooping to such predatory financial structures then perhaps it just shouldn't exist in the first place. But America is still too drunk on laissez faire capitalism to muster any will for legislative action in that regard.

Entrusting 18 year olds with the maturity of life-long decision making, perfect foresight, astute self-knowledge, and uniformly competent parental guidance -- what could possibly go wrong, right?

I have no idea what you mean by "just linking the filesystem".

Of course it isn't, but limiting installation instructions to the creation of a single well-defined Docker container makes a whole lot of sense in terms of avoiding reproducibility headaches.

And by extension, with regard to make development inside a container a pleasant experience, VS Code is currently the only game in town. And I say that as someone who spent two decades getting comfortable with vim.

Wow, I don't think I've ever seen anyone dial a strawman argument to 11 quite like you just did. Nobody was talking about FDR until you hamfistedly brought him up in a reply to a post (indirectly) lamenting a period of history rife with racism. Prejudice was rampant all across the "political spectrum", but prevalence is not a measure of justice or humanity. Nor does any individual's competency in one area somehow ameliorate their flaws in other areas.